Mark Carroll's Journal

Today went well in terms of working on my to-do list. I trimmed my hair, did a fair bit of vacuuming upstairs, made a nice lunch with poblano pepper omelette and sausages, mowed the front yard in the sunshine, wrote to my aunt, and washed my cloth masks. I feel justified in relaxing this evening.

Waiting for the floors of my house to finally be finished has been dragging me down. The more urgent work is outdoors, preventing leaks: improving drainage, replacing rotten wood, etc. The floors first require some better support below before being finished off. Still, eventually I would then be able to arrange furniture, like assembling bookcases, unpacking books, etc., which may warm my heart.

I can plausibly already go further in setting up for computing and music. Perhaps, rather than being down that I still have personal activities on hold, I can still set one of the bedrooms up, where the floors are already finished, to better allow me to pursue such diversions. Then, I may feel happier in general. Well, it's a thought, perhaps a rather belated one.

Over my career in computing, I have typically been most productive in working from home and, when at the office, more productive the more I had privacy and isolation for my workspace. Worst is when I have irrelevant conversations happening close by and activity visible in my sightline, then I have no chance of holding all the relevant context in mind and losing myself in the task at hand. From home, I have my colleagues within easy reach via multiple means, including e-mail, direct and group messaging, and video conferencing. I can also easily share my code and documents and comment on others'. It works well.

I have wondered why upper management in some software-based employers have been so keen to bring all their employees back into the office. What do they get out of it? Maybe they have personal assistants they are used to relying on for finding things or whatever, or some other kind of in-person collaboration that is not part of a regular employees' world. Why don't they see the disadvantages? Perhaps they are used to being able to afford to live close to work and buy lunch locally, having a private office that can be free of distractions, maybe have fewer tasks that require such prolonged, uninterrupted focus, expecting any employee to come to them at their convenience, etc. In short, I wonder if life in upper management is different enough to leave them with little clue of the impact of their edicts on those lower down the chain.

Given the buoyant employment market in the software industry, I shall be curious to see indications of if on-site working affects retention, if the businesses that are friendly to remote working now have their choice of applicants who have now found that they like to work from home. Separately, I have been surprised not to see more businesses trying to sell remote working as their saving the planet by reducing the emissions caused by commuting, in contrast to their evil competitors.

This afternoon, I finally got around to making progress with some long-overdue sysadmin, though there remains plenty yet to do. Annoyingly, I could not just move my MTA over to a new server because the same is not currently available with the latest release of the operating system, with not building and working fine against the current dependencies. This is probably quite solvable but will take a bit of effort and, if I wait briefly, somebody else might chime in with help. Not letting that stop me, I instead made DNS progress, including finally using my ISP's as secondaries.

My back is now largely feeling better, it's just that improvement was a slow process. I'm somewhat impeded in other ways lately, it's hard for me to get my morning workouts in because first I have to drag myself out of bed early enough and, due to externalities, recently it has often been difficult to get to bed early. I shall get through it all but, more generally, I am frustrated not to be getting more done, besides quick trivia, outside work: I end up just wanting to relax in front of social media or television or whatever, I just don't feel like doing more. Nevertheless, I'll try to look out for and make my chances for more focused effort, at least occasionally; getting started is the tough part.

I am succeeding in adjusting the frequency of my grocery shopping down to weekly mostly by means of a range of vegetables: I eat the more perishable, like broccoli or mushrooms, earlier in the week, then move on to carrots, sweet potatoes, onions, and suchlike, with canned vegetables as fallback. However, I find myself visiting multiple stores. For example, yesterday I visited both Kroger and Food City. Kroger does not have egg salad or the vegetarian Indian meals I like but Food City is poor at stock control, not even having offered parchment paper the past two visits, and it does not carry the berry granola that I like. I have yet to visit Aldi, maybe next weekend, but my memory of one in Boston does not suggest that it will stock all I want.

To my surprise, assembling my television stand is an effort that I am spreading over a few days. Simply unpacking it from the flat-pack was already an ordeal, there was much tape and a kind of improvised exoskeleton strengthening the outer box. The hardware is labeled A thru Z and not always clearly illustrated so it took me a while to assign letters to the packets; the different kinds of screw were among the last I faced. I am now some way into actually assembling the pieces, of which there are twenty-two kinds, having solved other issues, like which is 6 and which is 9.

Update: The television stand is now built, it even needed some extra drilling. I shall leave a review.

There seem to be so many things to do and, being new here, I do many of them slowly, even down to small chores like trying to find items in a local grocery store today. Having only just moved to the country, things need to be done on several fronts: to get many done in this first month I have been making fast decisions, some large. ( I have made good progress. )

Having done so much lately, I feel as if I need a rest; I am tired and slowing down. However, this next couple of weeks will be a challenge: I must fit my existing setup activity around proving myself in a full-time job while also having to wait at the empty house a lot to receive the various deliveries by which I furnish and appoint it. ( My house will not be comfortable for some time yet. )

I tell myself that I just have to keep going, that, if I can keep on just doing the next urgent thing, in time things will settle, the rate of urgent tasks will drop, that I will become faster at doing them, even be able to take an occasional breath. ( Many to-do's remain. )

I feel disconnected from my family who remain back in Scotland. ( We now live separate lives and I miss them. ) I hope to at least have one of the kids stay with me during a summer break.

While I worked in Ohio State's AI lab I took a few master's-level courses and found them strange. I was being set homeworks as if I were in secondary school, somebody else was choosing how much I worked on what each week. Whereas, for my bachelor's, to a first approximation the system was: don't bother registering for courses, just turn up and listen to what you like, at the end the academic year there will be examination questions covering a spread of these computer science topics, you'd better be able to answer enough of them. In my subsequent professional life this style has suited me: if I needed to learn something then I sat down with textbooks and studied them at my own pace, focusing my work on where I felt weak. For example, when I found myself in a job requiring use of Perl 5, I sat down with the Camel Book and experimented a bit. My initial Erlang learning went similarly and I enjoyed it.

I try to notice trends and open my mind to them. An Erlang online course fell into my lap and I had wanted to brush the rust off, in preparation for trying Elixir, so I thought I might give the course a try, one of these with videos to watch and problems to do and such. Into the third week, I am not much finding that it suits me. It has been difficult to fit the extra work into my schedule. The abstract problems to solve occupy more of my attention than anything specific to Erlang. I patiently listen to things that seem easy then have to rewind parts after my attention drifts. Then I find myself having assignments commented on by fellow students and doing likewise for them; it's a nice idea but to me it feels more like the blind leading the blind. There might be some value but my time is more valuable. At least at work with peer review, the cross-check is preferably by the best available critic; indeed, in my previous job, often the product lead for the codebase on which I'd worked. For returning to Erlang, I conclude that I am better off cutting my losses and going back to the textbooks, with which I can focus my time exactly where it is best spent.

Amid this pandemic I feel quite lucky. While I have been known to be eagerly social, such as in my undergraduate days, I was not always like that and I have spent much of my life without having friends close at hand. For instance, partly in knowing that I plan to return to the US, I don't have close friends locally and my nearest extended family lives over two hundred fifty miles away. My work history of moving from state to state or country to country has left me rootless, something I plan to start to fix with the next move. I have also done substantial amounts of telecommuting in the past, I prefer it, so working from home is just fine.

When I am apart from my whole family I do okay because I become rather productive and derive happiness from that instead. I can arrange everything without mind to or being distracted by others and I have more than a lifetime's engaging work on my to-do list. More commonly my past periods of isolation have been with my family. I am not saying that it doesn't change me as the weeks pass, it does, just not in a way that bothers me. Previously the most obvious effect for me has been the tolerable one of making other people seem curious and alien, on the rare occasions I did go out it began to feel like a safari trip to where the humans live to see how they behave and what their society is like, I had lost some familiarity with them.

I am also lucky to be living in a village within reach of much public land and to own a small car. Should I wish I can easily get out and about without coming near anybody else or much touching new surfaces and I carry hand sanitizer with me anyway. Just a few minutes ago I did my occasional thing of going outside to photograph the pretty dawn, on this occasion we had a pink cloud layer. Sometimes I run into a friendly neighbor who does likewise. This morning I did chat with him but briefly and at a distance. That seems to me a safe enough compromise, rather more alarming is seeing neighbors' children playing soccer and suchlike together in the square.